A high rate and diversity are two typical requirements of a personal communications service in the future. Access network densification shortens a wireless communication distance, and basically ensures high-rate connection. A feature of service diversity is that uplink and downlink service requirements of terminals vary according to different applications. A TDD (Time Division Duplex time division duplex) mode is convenient for a service with network service diversity. Therefore, dense deployment of wireless access points in the TDD mode is a trend of a network architecture in the future.
A coverage radius of each cell is greatly reduced because of network densification. In most scenarios, a quantity of terminals served by a cell is far less than that in a macro cell scenario. With diversity of terminal services, a service of each cell will show a relatively high volatility, that is, uplink and downlink services of a cell change relatively rapidly within a short period of time. Therefore, the 3GPP sets up an eIMTA (Enhanced Interference Management and Traffic Adaptation enhanced interference management and traffic adaptation) research project, to research technologies for managing interference in flexible TDD subframe configuration of a cell. In 3GPP R12 specifications, each cell may dynamically select, according to current uplink and downlink service requirements of a cell, TDD subframe configuration that adapts to a service. The greatest challenge brought by dynamic TDD subframe configuration of each cell to network interference management is cross subframe interference between cells; that is, for a same subframe, neighbor cells have different data transmission directions, and consequently, downlink or uplink transmission of a neighbor cell is interfered with by uplink or downlink transmission of a cell. The eIMTA research project is to research how to avoid or eliminate the cross subframe interference between the cells brought by the flexible TDD subframe configuration of the cell.
In the industry, a management thought for the cross subframe interference that may exist in the flexible TDD subframe configuration is: Different cells with a similar feature (for example, a path loss between stations is relatively low, and relatively high interference may be easily generated between the stations) are placed in an interference cell cluster. Each cell in the interference cell cluster uses same TDD subframe configuration, and different interference cell clusters may use different TDD subframe configuration, so as to achieve a compromise between interference management and traffic adaptation. However, currently, there is a singular and an inflexible manner for performing subframe configuration for a cell cluster in the prior art. Further, a factor for determining TDD subframe configuration of a cell cluster is not clear.